


A Lack of Color

by hedwwig



Series: Studies in Introspection [2]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-20 10:25:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1507109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedwwig/pseuds/hedwwig
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This isn’t as extreme as the stop motion episode, you don’t think, but on the other hand, that was only an episode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Lack of Color

**Author's Note:**

> This has been Yet Another Abed Fanfiction, brought to you by Me. Warnings for panic attacks, maybe, and some in-character ableism. Spoilers for Geothermal Escapism. Won’t make any sense if you aren’t at least caught up to that point. Thanks to Rachel, again, for a prompt that I only vaguely followed in the loosest sense of the word. Oops.

She’s stirring her coffee and laughing at a joke you don’t remember telling. You watch the liquid drip slowly off her spoon, creamy chestnut, then grey by the time it reaches the cup. You say nothing, just force yourself to meet her eyes for a second- you’re pretty sure they used to be blue- and twitch the corner of your mouth just so, quickly directing your gaze to the bustling street outside. It’s raining today, so you hardly notice the difference in hues. You see a red umbrella hurrying past, the color running off its domed surface in rivulets. You watch it swirl down a storm drain, alongside the yellow of a young child’s boots. 

You don’t want them to worry. This isn’t as extreme as the stop motion episode, you don’t think, but on the other hand, that was only an episode. That was waking up in a delusional haze, which is never as fun as indie movie soundtracks make it sound. That was sudden, and thorough, and terrifyingly obvious in its own way. This is a gradual change. The color is slowly draining from everything, and you have accepted it as your truth from this point forward. What scares you now is how normal it all seems.

You wonder what they would say if you told them. Snide comments about you not being human in the first place? Almost definitely. Followed by chastisement of the perpetrator from some of your more gentle-hearted friends, an immediate and inaccurate diagnosis from the psychiatrist. None of it would help. And it’s not such a big deal, living in this greyscale world. Everything looks largely the same. You have no intentions of joining the air force. You look down at your bowl of what you had assumed to be strawberry ice cream, before ordering. It was mint. You were okay with that.

You walk through the front door alone, that afternoon. Annie had to go back to school to work on some project for her criminology class. You said you were feeling under the weather, went back home. You hang your keys without looking, keeping your gaze carefully trained to the floor. Don’t look up on the way to your bedroom, don’t turn the lights on when you get inside because it’s not exactly safe there either. You can’t look at some things right now. You can’t allow yourself to notice that not everything is losing its color. 

You somehow got roped in to shopping with Jeff. Point blindly at a shirt, when he asks which color is better. They’re almost certainly Very Slightly Different shades of blue, anyway. You don’t know. It’s been too long now. You turn your back on him as he ponders the merits of plaid, and come very close to being startled, immediately. Because that sales associate said something orange, and you haven’t seen the color orange in six months. Ignoring the fact that you can somehow hear colors now, you inch closer to the woman, who’s now laughing and punching her coworker on the arm. You catch sight of his name tag. Oh. That must be what she said. You stand still for a moment as you work out the knot in your gut, then turn back to Jeff to assure him that yes, his arms look fantastic in that sweater.

You’re a year in to this whole colorblindness thing when you give up. You turn the lights on when you enter the apartment, and don’t look away from the wall as you hang your key. His is bronze. Next to it, the picture that caused your breakup with Rachel. You had forgotten how much you loved the color green. You turn from the wall and look around the apartment, allowing yourself to catch more than an accidental glimpse of the traces of the rainbow still left here. His chair is the brown of melted milk chocolate, his fingerprints sky blue on the armrests, gripped too tight during particularly emotional cinematic climaxes. In your room, swirls of forest green ground into the rug, indigo imprints on the one pillowcase you refuse to wash, his letterman jacket crumpled in the back of the closet oozing purple into your clothes. You sigh. In for the trailer, in for the movie, then. 

You go to your laptop and open a file you haven’t worked on in ages. Nothing important, an old work in progress. It’s silent for the first seven seconds, a flaw in the recording. He’s in full color, as you expected. When the sound kicks in, your vision is suddenly awash in shades of gold, the very air in the room shimmering from the sound of Troy’s voice. He laughs, and says your name, and you feel the vacuum more keenly than you have since he left at all, because your eyes are open and for an instant, everything has color again, and looks like it’s supposed to, and it’s all too much, to be honest. You pause the video and slam your eyes shut. Sitting alone in your room, in a quiet, empty apartment, you pull in rapid, panicked breaths as though you’d been running a marathon. You open your eyes and almost everything is grey again. Cool. Coolcoolcool. You close the computer and take one more deep breath. 

Now would probably be a good time to admit to yourself that perhaps something had gone wrong in the cloning process. Because there was a knot in your throat, and your hands were shaking, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. 

You were supposed to be okay.


End file.
